Manufacturers face 'broken pipeline'

Sunday

Dec 23, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Massachusetts faces shortage of skilled workers

By Adam Ellsworth SPECIAL TO THE TELEGRAM & GAZETTE

When Peter Toomey was growing up, he wanted to be an engineer. He enrolled at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical High School in Fitchburg, but it didn't take him long to realize that engineering wasn't what he had hoped it would be.

“It was more like a church,'' he said of the engineering program at the school. “It was very stringent, very quiet, and it wasn't very exciting.''

The school's machine shop was far more interesting to Mr. Toomey. Once he started working in it, he knew he had found what he wanted to do. He's spent the past 33 years working with machines as a mold maker. The last 17 of those years have been with Nypro Inc., the plastics manufacturer headquartered in Clinton. He still finds it more exciting than engineering.

“Every day is different,'' he said. “You've got to be thinking all the time in this business.''

Mr. Toomey is part of a dying breed in Massachusetts. Skilled mold makers, toolmakers and machinists are in short supply, even though the state's manufacturing industry is thriving and hiring. Adding to the dilemma, the state's manufacturing workforce is aging rapidly, and younger workers are turning towards other industries.

Toolmaking is a “key position'' at Nypro, said Robert E. Brand, senior director of corporate human relations for the company.

A 2012 survey conducted by the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University found that 43 percent of the state's manufacturers had either “difficulty'' or “extreme difficulty'' recruiting skilled craftsmen. The results of the survey, as well as other findings, were published by The Boston Foundation in “Staying Power II: A Report Card in Massachusetts 2012.''

The report states that Massachusetts' manufacturing workforce is aging faster than workers in the rest of the state's economy, and that in 2010 nearly 54 percent of the state's manufacturing jobs were held by individuals 45 or older. For all other Massachusetts industries, less than 45 percent of the workforce is 45 or older.

“The pipeline is broken,'' John J. Healy, director of the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership in Worcester, said in a phone interview. “The schools are not producing enough to replace the amount of people that are leaving.''

It wasn't always such a problem for the state's manufacturers.

“A lot of the systems that had been in place in the '60s and '70s really aren't in place anymore,'' said Nancy L. Snyder, president and chief executive officer of the Commonwealth Corporation. Ms. Snyder serves on the executive committee of the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative, a state initiative launched by Gov. Deval Patrick in 2011 to advance manufacturing in Massachusetts.

Several large apprenticeship programs that had been run by large manufacturing organizations no longer exist, Ms. Snyder said. Technical high schools that once had large manufacturing programs have scaled back, she said.

The programs began to go away in the 1980s, when the industry was becoming highly technological, Ms. Synder said. During that decade, and up to the first years of the 21st century, manufacturers cut back on hiring new workers. With the state's manufacturing workforce aging, and a recent trend of work that had previously gone off-shore returning to the U.S., manufacturers are starting to hire again, Ms. Snyder said.

“I think we're at a point where we need to rebuild some of the infrastructure that was in place a couple of decades ago,'' she said.

“We have a perpetual opening'' for machinists, said Patrick Mullane, president and chief executive officer of Fabrico Inc. The company, which is in Oxford, makes metal components for gas turbines.

Mr. Mullane believes that part of the reason there aren't enough young people entering the manufacturing industry is because too much emphasis is placed on young people getting a college education, and not enough is put on acquiring the skills needed to be employed.

“There are a lot of folks who get a college degree that is, frankly, relatively meaningless, and doesn't allow them to be imminently employable,'' he said.

In Massachusetts, the average hourly wage for an “unskilled'' manufacturing worker is $13.95, according to the “Staying Power II'' report, well above the state minimum hourly wage of $8. “Skilled'' workers average just under $26 an hour, according to the report.

The lack of a college degree should not be mistaken for a lack of intelligence, Mr. Mullane added.

“You've got to have some smarts'' to work as a machinist, he said. Math, metallurgy and physics are just a few of the skills today's machinists need, he said.

After his graduation from Clinton High School in 1978, Frank Savino, a machinist at Fabrico, didn't have any real direction, and he knew he wasn't going to college. He ended up in a state-run apprenticeship program, where he learned on the job during the day and attended classes at Worcester Vocational Technical High School at night.

“Technology changes so fast now,'' Mr. Savino said, but he's been able to evolve with it. The basics of the machines haven't changed, he said, but things that used to be done by hand are now done with computers.

To start getting younger machinists and other skilled workers into the company, Fabrico set up a co-op program about a year and a half ago. Students from Bay Path Regional Vocational Technical High School in Charlton work alongside Fabrico employees in machining and other areas of the company to learn the skills they need to be successful, and to hopefully provide Fabrico with some new employees.

Students get their first taste of what it's like to work for a company, said Christopher O'Malley, Fabrico's production manager.

While the program has not yet produced a new machinist for Fabrico, it has seen some success. The company recently hired a co-op graduate to work as a metal fabricator, yet another position that is in short supply.